Forget those glass blocks! Don’t you wish you had a building material with the structural integrity of concrete and the light transmitting ability of glass? Litracon wins major cool points by putting fiber-optic strands in concrete blocks to achieve results like the ones above. Even cooler: Light can travel 20 meters through the fiber optics before losing brightness.
A Hungarian architect invented Litracon — short for “light-transmitting-concrete” — in 2001, and he started his own Budapest-based company in 2004. The material is slowly catching on, and it was even considered as one of the materials for the Freedom Tower in New York. You can see some incredible pictures on their website.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to develop plans for my glowing underground bunker.
Translucent Concrete [Litracon]
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5 Responses to It’s Just Cool: Translucent Concrete
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Hey, about that glowing, underground bunker…
The whole point of an underground bunker is to stop radiation. But visible light is a kind of radiation, and I’ve heard nothing from the makers of this stuff stating that it stops what you can’t see.
Just sayin.’
It could never be used structurally because you’re just going to see a lot of rebar and rocks.
Brau … I’m guessing that’s not a problem because the fibers simply wrap around the rebar and aggregates. How much the show, if at all, id probably a function of size and how close they are to the surface.
It’s great for daylight but what about the night when the lights are on inside? The exterior of the wall would be a Balinese puppet show. Absent interior blinds I suppose.
Perfect for shop walls. Secure while still letting in light.